Feline updates

 blather, cats  3 Responses »
Jun 302018
 

It’s been not quite two months since I lost Raedthinn. This has left Speedbump, Buttons and Fingers 9not to mention me) without the “alpha cat.” Some observations:

1) Speedbump seems wholly unaffected. Not surprising; he’s the youngest of them and did not interact that much with Raedthinn.

2) Buttons has developed a new hobby… wandering around the house and calling out mournfully. It is a sound that certainly seems sad, but of course what’s sad to a human might be a song of joy to another species. But I do wonder sometimes if Buttons is perhaps calling out to Raedthinn, asking him to come back out and rejoin the family.

3) Fingers no longer purrs herself to sleep on Raedthinns favorite corner of the bed. What with time and laundering, I guess the corner no longer smells like Raedthinn. She has become distinctly more friendly with *me,* seeking physical contact far more than she used to… basically she almost *never* used to, reserving that sort of thing for Raedthinn. She interacts very minimally with the other two cats, basically unchanged. Mostly, she just sits by herself in a window. Distressingly, she has made  a few attempts to dash out the door, something she hasn’t tried in years. This was something I was afraid of… Raedthin  was her favorite thing about this house, and once he was no longer here I wondered if she would decide that she didn’t want to be here anymore. So far she hasn’t gotten to close to escape, but the urge is clearly there.

 Posted by at 2:19 pm

June 2018 APR Patreon Rewards

 aircraft, art, history, nukes, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  1 Response »
Jun 302018
 

In just under the wire for June, 2018 are the rewards for APR Patreon patrons. Included this month:

  • A sizable January, 1945 technical description of the YP-80 “Shooting Star” by Lockheed. 300 or so pages, filled with illustrations of the aircraft and components.
  • “On The Utility of the Moon in Space Transportation: the Lunatron Concept.” A 1963 NASA concept for using an electromagnetic accelerator to hurl payloads from the lunar surface onto high energy trajectories, up to solar system escape.
  • A scan of a large-format Sikorsky lithograph of an ABC (advancing blade concept) VTOL airliner (basically a 727 fuselage turned into a high-speed helicopter).
  • An all-new CAD diagram of the Soviet Chelomei LKS spaceplane with an inboard profile showing the military (nuclear bombardment) payload. The first in a series on the LKS.

If you are interested in helping to preserve (and get copies of) this sort of thing, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

 

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 Posted by at 11:39 am

“Life With Lockheed”

 aircraft, history, Patreon, projects  3 Responses »
Jun 302018
 

In 1959 Lockheed printed up a self-promotion booklet to sell to new and prospective employees the advantages of their Georgia facility. It includes a lot of photos showing the joys of working in the deep south in the era before universal adoption of air conditioning while wearing three piece suits and ties, as well as photos and art of the various facilities, aircraft and projects then at work at Lockheed-Georgia.

I have posted the full-rez scan of the booklet, available to $10+ APR Patreon patrons. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

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 Posted by at 2:50 am

So, you’ve found yourself in a vacuum…

 blather, Hmm..., science, science fiction, youtube  5 Responses »
Jun 282018
 

Sometimes, sci fi gets it wrong. Sometimes, you don’t know. The movie “Outland” and “Total Recall,” for instance, show unprotected people blowing up like balloons when suddenly exposed to a vacuum. Other movies such as “2001” show people holding their breath and survive a few seconds of exposure. Others like “The Expanse” show people in space suits nonchalantly opening their faceplates for a few seconds to adjust things with no ill effects. So what’s the truth?

Until President Trump stops dicking around and turns over the federal prison system to the US Space Force and we can *finally* execute rapists and murderers and gang members and anti-nuclear activists and terrorists by shoving them out the airlock, we won’t know for sure just what the effects of explosive decompression really are on unprotected humans. But a few sub-scale experiments can be attempted. Standard latex balloons filled with water and air bubbles make a *fair* approximation of a body, and a simple vacuum chamber makes a *meh* approximation of the vacuum of outer space. So what happens? Well, “Outland” exaggerated the speed of the process… but, yeah, kerblam.

Holding your breath would be spectacularly useless, as well as potentially deadly. Human skin is stronger and less stretchy than latex rubber, so the effects shown here would be smaller and slower. What allows the water in the balloons to boil is that the air bubbles can expand because the latex is so stretchy, and as the balloon stretches the pressure within drops far enough for the water to boil. A better experiment would be to use something like very thin leather, actual animal skin, or some sort of other polymer, preferably something that simulates skins physical properties while also being transparent.

With an actual human, the skin would hold up reasonably well, at least for a while. But other exposed surfaces are less rugged. The interior of the sinuses and the lungs themselves are thinner, weaker, more porous; I suspect that within seconds an exposed person would be blowing bubbles of bloodfoam. As the heart continues to beat it will continue to pump blood through the lungs. Dissolved gases in the blood will readily pass through the membranes and be expelled to space, so the oxygen levels of the blood will plummet rapidly. And as the gasses disappear and the skin expands, blood pressure will drop… especially if the person starts bleeding out through the lungs and mucous membranes. As the blood pressure drops, especially with rapidly depleting oxygen levels, the heart will soon just plain quit.

 Posted by at 10:46 pm

Cancelling Nazi Flying Saucers

 aircraft, art, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, history, Hmm..., Meh., models, news, politics, science fiction, ಠ_ಠ  18 Responses »
Jun 282018
 

So, this happened:

Toy UFO taken off shelves for ‘teaching kids that Nazis achieved space travel’

The “Haunebu II” is a purported late-war Nazi German design for a flying saucer. There are a *lot* of model kits out there for “Luftwaffe, 1946” designs… wacky or otherwise interesting unbuilt aircraft designs produced in Nazi Germany. I myself began my interest in unbuilt aircraft and spacecraft projects with Luft’46 designs… largely because in the late 1980’s, those were just about the *only* designs widely available for advanced unbuilt aircraft. That’s the thing: if you lose a war, you lose control over your secret designs, so all the German stuff was available. But American designs? We were able to keep them secret. In the decades since, interest in non-Nazi unbuilt projects has of course exploded, so now publications loaded with American “secret projects” are readily at hand.

But there’s the problem: Haunebu II is bullcrap. This and other “Nazi flying saucers” are pure post-war fictions without  scrap of evidentiary basis. Instead, they are simply cash-grabs by people wanting a piece of that UFO-nutburger market, combined with a dollop of neo-Nazi fantasizing. Most of these designs didn’t exist in any form until the 80’s or so.

At one level, for this model that’s ok. People have been making model kits of science fiction subjects for generations. The problem here is that apparently Revells packaging and information on the instructions did not point out that this was an unbuilt design, did not point out that it’s a post-war fiction… apparently it said that this thing actually not only flew, it flew into space. It said that the Nazis were the first into space thanks to this thing.

Gah.

As someone interested in accurate history, that sort of thing is grating, to say the least. I would have demanded that Revell revise the info. But the problem for Revell is that they are a *German* company, and in Germany it’s verbotten to glorify the Nazis (I’m unaware if it is equally illegal to glorify the Soviets…). So it seems that Revell has yanked this kit from the market, possibly for good. On the one hand… meh. Until this news hit, I was unaware that Revell was making this kit, and I would not have been interested in it anyway. On the other hand, yay for getting rid of false history. On the gripping hand, boo for censorship.

As an exercise, google “haunebu.” You’ll find a *lot* of references. Many of these will be news items about this model getting yanked. Others will be reviews and online sales for similar models produced by other manufactures. And there’ll be a *lot* of hits for sites describing the Haunebu series as real designs; of then these sites add a whole lot of additional supernatural/magical woo on top. But in all that, *try* to find sites that point out that these things are BS. Facts and the truth are buried under mountains of nonsense and outright lies, to the point that a lot of people actually believe that the Nazis had these damned flying saucers.

 Posted by at 11:21 am

Well this sounds horrifying

 AARRRGH, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
Jun 282018
 

This sounds like the beginning of a movie. Specifically a “this is how the zombie apocalypse begins” movie.

‘Unbearable’ smelling passenger that caused plane’s emergency landing dies from tissue necrosis

Short from: Russian rock musician went to the Canary Islands for vacation, picked up some sort of “beach infection.” On the flight from the islands to Amsterdam, he began to smell so bad that nearby passengers started to hurl. Crew moved him to the bathroom to try to control the smell; the plane was diverted to Portugal. Stinky guy removed by medical professionals, and later died of the “beach infection.” Unclear how “later” later actually was… hours or days, undefined.

What’s surprising to me isn’t that a guy caught some sort of horrible disease on an island. What surprised me is just how fast it apparently worked; one gets the feeling that when he boarded the flight he might not have smelled so bad, but within a few hours he was so fragrant that his stank was sickening others.

Yikes.

 Posted by at 1:33 am

Rocket Bus

 art, awesomeness, history, science fiction  14 Responses »
Jun 262018
 

An advertisement circa 1955 by Mack Trucks showing a fanciful “rocket bus” of the future. This is of course in no way a serious proposal, but instead a humorous illustration of automotive excess. Still, it’s an interesting look into a long-extinct mindset: “the future will be full of awesome.”

It’s interesting that in the sixty-plus years since this illustration was made, “the bus” has not really changed that much. Sure, they’re more efficient, probably more comfortable… but they’re essentially the same size, taking the same passenger load on the same roads at virtually the same speeds. I have little insight into the mindset of bus designers from the middle of the 1950s, but I’d lay odds that they would have expected that the bus of 2018 would be *fundamentally* different. Atomic powered, or hovercraft, or wing-in-ground-effect, or electromagnetically levitated… something.

 Posted by at 2:17 pm
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